Tech Savvy: How to manage your
bulging email inbox
There are many simple steps you can
take to cope with the flood of email that is expected to increasingly pile up
in your inbox.
by Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles
Times, August 16, 2012
I lost my entire day to email
yesterday, and I bet you've had days like that too.
Recent studies found that the
average employee spends a third of her workday dealing with email. On average,
people receive 110 emails a day and double that in the office. It's a huge time
suck, and it's expected to worsen as more people use email to communicate.
But you don't have to succumb to the
digital deluge. There are many simple steps you can take to manage the bulging
inbox.
The first big step is to fend off
superfluous email. For instance, if you don't want to know what your Facebook
friend is doing at the moment, change your notification settings by clicking on
the arrow at the top of the screen. Click on "account settings" and
then "notifications" on the far left of the screen. Click on Facebook
and uncheck all the little boxes such as "tags you in a photo."
And if you're tired of newsletters
and unsolicited emails from retailers, unsubscribe from them. There is usually
an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the emails. Click on it and tell them not
to send you any more.
You can also tell your email system
to send certain emails directly to the trash bin so you don't have to look at them.
In Outlook you can do this by right-clicking on the email, clicking on the junk
mail tab and adding the address to "blocked senders list."
What to do with emails you want to
keep and read?
Create an email filing system. One
way is to create a folder called Old Email and move your entire inbox into it
at the end of each day. You can still access the emails in this folder, but
they won't distract you each time you open your inbox to see new messages.
Mark Hurst, author of the book
"Bit Literacy," suggests you also create a To Do folder and move the
emails that require action into it.
"The method is very simple:
Separate your to do's from the rest of your emails, so that you can work from a
to do list, rather than an inbox," which wasn't designed to manage
workflow, he said.
You might also consider subscribing
to an email management service such as SaneBox that automatically prioritizes
your email. SaneBox costs $5 a month and leaves only the emails it thinks you
need to see immediately in your inbox, while gathering the remaining emails in
another folder.
The service will send you an email
(yes, another email) with a list of the other emails you have received
throughout the day.
"The average inbox has only 42%
that are important and 58% that are not important," said Dmitri Leonov, a
vice president at SaneBox. "Our users move things around a lot, but the
split almost always remains the same."
Finally, be smart about the emails
you send. Use the phone to conduct business that requires a lot of
back-and-forth discussion. Remember, the more emails you send, the more you
receive.
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